The GeoSeer index of OGC Services continues to grow, now standing tantalisingly close to 200,000 services: there are currently 197,911 from over four thousand four hundred different hosts. And of course this only includes active services; the index is kept in an "evergreen" state consisting only of services that actually worked when we last queried them. There are many more services that are intermittent but these aren't useful to you so don't feature in the index.

On adventures we go

As well as continuing to hone and expand the service, we've also been participating in some community events. In June we participated in the OGC's API Hackathon in London, part of the process for developing the next generation of OGC spatial standards. They're at an early phase - with API Features being the furthest along - and we participated with the aim of making sure that discoverability was kept in mind during their development. After all, there's no point developing cutting edge standards if no-one can find implementations.

Then we went to Italy to the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) - home of INSPIRE - to present and participate in a workshop about service discovery and search engines with regards to INSPIRE services. We met some of the people behind a few of the portals we harvest from, and exchanged thoughts on how services and data can be made more discoverable.

Statistics - SRS

We received a user enquiry as to which Spatial Reference System (SRS) was most common in OGC services, so we did a quick check and wanted to share the top results with everyone because who doesn't like stats. Note that there are lots of caveats that we won't go into here, we're sharing these as-is. It doesn't come as a surprise that EPSG:4326 aka WGS84, and Web Mercator are the most common.

The datasets define 1,318 different SRS'; above are just the ones with more than 100,000 datasets. We're always open to doing some stats analysis, just ask.

Licensing?

Finally, we've started investigating making the database available to third parties via licensing. If you're interested, let us know. Watch this space.